Dallas ISD is embracing evening and online classes to cut down on the high number of students who drop out of school each year.
Administrators are also exploring how to catch teens before they ever fall behind.
After the pandemic disrupted thousands of children’s educations, the district doubled down on expanding its credit recovery programs to get students back on track for earning a diploma.
“Everyone doesn’t fit in the exact same mold,” Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said during a Thursday board briefing. “We have to have a variety of ways to meet our student needs.”
The district’s efforts could help it chip away at its high dropout rate, which was above 12% for the Class of 2021. The projected dropout rate for 2022 was roughly 11%.
Dallas’ four-year graduation rate – 80.1% – is below the state and regional average, a statistic that has provided fodder for Republican politicians seeking to knock the district.
DISD’s strategies provide flexibility to high schoolers severely behind in credits as they try to catch up to their peers, officials said.
Last school year, more than 6,000 students completed one or more courses through the district’s credit recovery programs, district data shows. That represents a substantial increase over the past several years, during which the number of students earning credit via such courses never topped 4,800.
“Some of that is pandemic recovery, but a lot of it is the expansion of all of the programs that we have,” Dallas schools chief Tiffany Huitt said.
The opportunity to catch up was a key reason why a large number of students were able to cross the graduation stage last year. Over the course of their high school career, roughly one-third of the 2022 senior class completed credit recovery work to ensure they graduated on time, according to district data.
Nearly 150 students who were fifth-year high schoolers or older were also able to graduate in the fall. Some of them went through a program called Grad Lab, which targets students who have dropped out and want to come back.
These students — for example, a 19-year-old with a freshman level of credits — can take individualized courses in the evenings, structured around their schedules.
Meanwhile, district leaders are looking into developing an “early detection warning system” for students just entering high school.
“We want to get to our freshmen before they ever need credit recovery,” Huitt said.
Such signs could include probing a students’ attendance trends. Did the child miss a lot of school in eighth grade and appear to be on the same path in high school?
“We can go ahead and get in front of that,” Huitt said, noting the program is still in the planning stage.
The district is also working toward providing 24-hour, on-demand virtual tutoring to students on a nontraditional graduation path. If a student is juggling credit recovery, a job and family responsibilities, they might need to log on for tutoring late at night or early in the morning.
“The goal is to work ourselves out of a job,” Huitt said. “We hope that, over time, we can reduce the amount of students who need this support.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
